


Bones of Binary Code

by Thatkindghost



Category: Code Lyoko
Genre: Alternate Universe, Gen, computer program!odd, odd is a computer program
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-05
Updated: 2018-10-05
Packaged: 2019-07-25 11:31:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,154
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16196669
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Thatkindghost/pseuds/Thatkindghost
Summary: Odd shares Jeremie's embarassing childhood photos with Aelita, and Jeremie decides to have his revenge by digging up some of Odds baby pictures too. what he finds- or what he doesn't find- could change everything.





	Bones of Binary Code

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to densekohai for beta-ing! Appreciate the help!

It starts innocently - as things always do when Odd plays his tricks, when Jeremie’s father sends him a letter packed with old photos. Jeremie is an only child, whose parents dote on him dearly, and in an attempt to give him nostalgia from his childhood (and perhaps remind him of their love), the envelope is practically bursting with silly photos of Jeremie’s youth. Baby pictures, kindergarten schoolbook photos, Christmas cards with his chubby cheeks and gap toothed smile on the front- and of course Jeremie had to open this particular package in front of Ulrich and Odd, dropping embarrassing pictures all over their cafeteria table.

Odd may not have been the best student at Kadic Academy, but he was quick on the draw and realized exactly what he was looking at - before Jeremie can process, Odd is snatching up as many photos as he could before the resident Einstein could sweep them back into the envelope and away from prying eyes.

“Aww, look at him Ulrich!” Odd giggles, spreading out the 3 salvaged photos like a hand of cards. “Isn’t he so cute?”

Jeremie blanched, noting Aelita and Yumi approaching out of the corner of his eye, “Odd! Give those back!” He panicked.

“No way!” He laughed as Yumi and Aelita joined the table, “I think the girls oughta see these!” He teases, slapping the pictures down for Aelita to see.

“Odd!” Jeremie groaned, blushing as Aelita looked them over.

She laughs a little bit, smiling at Jeremie, “I think you look pretty cute!” Her rosy cheeks match her hair.

“Oh. Uh…” Jeremie runs the back of his neck, face flushing darker, “Thanks Aelita.”

Yes, that's the beginning, small and entirely harmless, but things in their group never remained small, and rarely ever harmless, because Jeremie wanted revenge. It wasn’t going to be anything too bad- no! It’s not like he planned on sending any photos to the entire school! He just wanted to give Odd a taste of his own medicine. Maybe hunt down a few kid pictures on MySpace or Facebook to share with the group. It was totally fine, no biggie, right?

Except… except something wasn’t right, like it never was.

Jeremie had clicked through hundreds of posts- by Odd’s parents, his five sisters, his neighbors, the kids he went to school with- he even visited his elementary school record, passing their rather flimsy firewall to browse though the names of every student who’d been enrolled.

But in all these photos, the ones with Pauline and Adele at the beach with their family in the background, the ones with Marie and Louise and Elizabeth one Christmas morning with only five stockings hanging from the fireplace, the class photo’s one blonde short, the absence of pictures, of documentation, of anything at all-

Jeremie is verging on the edge of something sinister and dark. Something scary.

Because according to the birth records he pulled up, combing through them not two, but three times over and found something blank and wrong, an emptiness where there should have been a child.

Missing it once? An accident. Twice is a coincidence.

But after the third time Jeremie picks through the birth certificates and finds no Orlando Montrel Della Robbia- Odd’s full name- and knows that this is a pattern.

There was no trace of him anywhere, it was as if he simply… didn’t exist.

So he dug deeper.

There was no trace of his best friend anywhere. He seemed to have just… shown up out of the blue one day. He didn’t exist, and then suddenly he did- getting caught on grainy security cameras or in the background of obscure and far between photos. There was never an adult with him, only Kiwi - and even the small dog was recent too. He was always strategically turned away in each candid photo, dodging every seemingly unnoticed camera trained on his face, only the distinctive outfits he wore and the dog with him gave him away. He was nobody, no one- he enrolled into Kadic late - almost didn’t make the cut, but slid in just barely.

The rabbit hole goes deeper- because Odd did have a birth record on file, but when Jeremie accesses it, it’s blank.

He doesn’t understand anything at all. And yet… and yet there's a pit in his stomach. Odd didn’t seem frightened the first time he was virtualized accidentally on Lyoko. How he has facial markings like Aelita. How he plays dumb, more so than necessary, when Jeremie talks about the supercomputer… how his fingers twitch, almost imperceptibly tense, right before Jeremie discovers XANA’s activated a tower. The little things, which previously seemed inconsequential at the time, start pooling in his head, making him think and think and think about things that are sharp and painful.

He goes to the factory slowly, this time. There’s no tower to deactivate, no virus to cure, no life or death situation… just a cold pit in his stomach and the weight of lies hanging on his ears.

It’s a diary entry from Franz Hopper that he wants to rewatch. It’s one when he’s already in the throes of madness. His hair is a mess, He’s babbling, talking about everything and nothing all at once-

“I’m trying to make a new program,” he says, sifting through stacks of papers sitting in his lap, “One to protect us, to warn us of who’s coming- and when! It will be completed soon, I hope- God, I hope. I wish to stop living this nightmare. Aelita-”

He goes on for several minutes. The only time the program has been mentioned before. When Jeremie had watched it the first time, he wondered almost lazily if the program was meant to be Anticipation- or Future Flash, as Odd liked to call it, but he never looked into it.

Jeremie, in a daze, begins once again to dig.

There’s are fragments of notes, things written in the margins of other paper, things that didn’t make sense, but soon began to paint a picture when Jeremie finally connected the dots.

Franz Hopper was afraid of the government. He was paranoid, always on edge, never able to relax because he didn’t know what was coming. He had all the technology, the power to code a god, and yet he could not keep himself from checking the lock on his house sixteen times before he even began to consider bed. He was terrified for Aelita, of what she would be left with in the event of the unthinkable happening, and if she lost her father too.

Franz Hopper was a scared old man, afraid of the uncertain.

So he decided to predict the future.

It’s a set of algorithms that first catches Jeremie’s eye. Future Flash wasn’t magic - it was out of the realm of science fiction - it was programming, a piece of binary code - 01100011 01101111 01100100 01100101--

It was precise, a marvel to understand the intricacies, the flawlessness…

Future Flash ran constantly, running scenario after scenario until it narrowed down the one inevitability with incredible accuracy - It was a program meant to predict the future, made by Franz Hopper, so why..?

He’s looking through the files when he comes upon something interesting and small, insignificant if not for the mental fine-toothed comb he was running over each document, looking for any inconsistency.

There's some animal hair, scattered on the tabletop next to Hopper’s earliest notes.

Jeremies stomach rolled.

Cat fur.

Jeremie throws himself away from the super computer, pacing the length of the room restlessly. What did Franz Hopper do? Did he virtualize his cat? Was that truly the first guinea pig? Did Odd come from that cat? Why did it make him humanoid? Why purple? Why give him Future Flash? Why? _Why_?

It’s the only question he can ask himself, leaning against the cool concrete walls.  Burying his head in his hands.

Eventually he goes back to the computer, looks through more of his notes - these pages near the end, they’re especially hard to read. His handwriting has gone to shit, chock-full of stains and tears. Jeremie wonder what Hopper was going through that he still managed to record his work.

He almost misses it- it’s in pencil, not pen this time, written on the bottom of a looseleaf sheet of paper.

_Aelita will need a friend_

It’s barely legible, seeming to have been added later. Beside it are the faintest outlines of some rudimentary code.

Jeremie stills, because it is familiar. He minimizes the window, clicking away to pull up his friends’ avatar cards, double clicking on Odd’s and simply… compares.

There’s not a line out of place, not a single digit of difference. Odd’s avatar’s programming is obviously more complete - he’s a fully actualized being after all, but the basics are…. Exactly the same. Franz built Odd off of the previous Future Flash programming, using it as a springboard and a way to keep the ability within reach. He modeled him after their family pet to bring his daughter some sort of familiarity - which, Jeremie noticed, was why Future Flash is _completely_ useless in combat.

Odd was never meant to fight. None of them were. He was created to give Aelita company, to settle the paranoia in Franz Hopper's broken mind. The Laser Arrows must have been an afterthought, something he tossed in when he’d realized XANA was becoming restless.

But why was Odd _here_ , on Earth? There was something he was missing, a crucial piece to all of this - but he’d combed through these files hundreds of times by now, there was nothing more --

Jeremie lurched forward, scrabbling over the keys. He slaps his hand onto the avatar menu, reopens Odd’s programming card. Of course, of course! The one place he didn’t think to examine so closely. Was it possible there was something hidden past Hopper’s program? Something he had yet to notice?

He scans it four times, frustration making his jaw clench, before he finds it.

It’s deep into his code, farther than Jeremie had ever had to look before.

It's a failsafe.

He sits back in his chair, a hand over his mouth.

It’s simple, really, so simple that Jeremie could have passed it right by if it didn’t look _exactly_ like the program he’d built to materialize Aelita. He isolates it, runs a computer wide search, digs up what exactly this code was…

Because Franz Hopper was no fool, and he was paranoid. He was _paranoid_ . Why would he willingly trap himself into the Supercomputer, no way to run if the men in black found him again? Yes, it was _supposed_ to be safe- but still. Maybe he would have, with the aid of Future Flash to show him.

Maybe he would have, if he knew it wasn’t a trap at all.

He’d made a failsafe, set it on a timer, giving him enough opportunity to escape the demons chasing him, enough time for him to berid himself of them once and for all, if ever he was caught in the event of the Supercomputer shutting down. In the event of a catastrophic loss.

And the Supercomputer _was_ shut down, and after a certain amount of time without being touched, with Franz and Aelita and their companion program living or not living in a stasis - it was supposed to turn back on and materialize them. It was supposed to guarantee that they would be okay.

But, as Jeremie searches through the archives, he finds that the failsafe was only assigned to Franz and Aelita, (there’s a third profile here that’s definitely not Odd. It’s empty. Jeremie thinks it might have belonged to Aelita's mother) and not the springboard Franz had used to create Odd.

The remaining question in Jeremie's mind is _what exactly had happened_ back then.

 

He con only speculate but... right before the computer was shut down, when Franz and Aelita were virtualized, XANA activated a tower. He deleted Hopper's **own** failsafe protocol, but there was no time with Aelita, so it carried out the faster option of simply switching the saving grace from one avatar to another. From the princess to her simple pet, her harmless friend. It makes sense, matches with the timeline and with the history logs hidden deep within the supercomputers files.

The Supercomputer followed its orders, the remaining failsafe worked flawlessly, and three months before Jeremie arrived at Kadic Academy, the scanners materialized something. Not Aelita, not Franz, not anything originally human.

Conveniently, that was the same time Odd seemed to come into society. Into existence.

You see, it always starts out like this- simple and carefree, when Odd plays his tricks. He’d laughed at Jeremie's baby photos, teeth flat and human and grinning with real emotions and feeling. Jeremie just had to up the ante. He just had to go looking looking looking, too curious for his own good.

And you know what they say.

Curiosity killed the cat.


End file.
